1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is in the field of e-commerce and pertains particularly to methods and apparatus for facilitating online shopping via a shopping cart facility.
2. Discussion of the State of the Art
Consumer online shopping is an increasingly important component of commerce. Online shopping is convenient for the consumer, who can shop from any merchant with an online presence and without commute time. It is convenient for the merchant, who can reach customers globally and interact with them without the routine presence of sales staff. Online retail locations (“web sites”) on the world wide web serve the role that a physical or “bricks-and-mortar” store, or a mail-order catalog, have in the past.
An online shopping site conventionally combines a catalog display with a shopping cart. The catalog display presents the merchandise. The shopping cart represents items that the consumer has selected for purchase. Items are added to the shopping cart by selecting them from the catalog display. When the consumer “checks out” from the store, the shopping cart items are purchased.
In current online shopping sites, the shopping cart is represented as a list of items, conventionally ordered vertically. Each item is represented by a rectangle width the same width and height, and the position of items in the cart is set algorithmically by the system, not by the consumer.
When shopping in a physical store, the consumer can directly manipulate several items, in order to inspect their appearance in the aggregate, and use this to guide further selections from the store's stock. When shopping from a mail-order catalog, the consumer can clip pictures from the catalog pages to assemble a collage, and use this as a temporary shopping cart before copying the item names onto an order form or reading them to a telephone salesperson, for the same purpose.
The online representation of a shopping cart is adequate to the task of aggregating items for a purchase. It does not fulfill the additional roles of allowing the consumer to visually judge the appearance of an ensemble of items, and of letting the consumer use this appearance to guide further product selection.
Consumers are accustomed to seeing products arranged visually in two main ways—in the context of large scenes, or arranged separately but thematically on the page—in news, fashion, lifestyle, and other special interest magazines featuring new and useful products.
The use of a mail-order catalog as a source for clippings allows the consumer to replicate these styles of arrangement with a consumer's own selection of products. What is desirable is a set of methods and systems for combining the efficiency and potential for online collaboration of online shopping, with the graphic manipulation possibilities provided by mail-order catalogs.
More particularly, what is needed is a set of methods and systems that present an online shopping car as a set of spatial representations, and that enable a consumer to select products from an online catalog, and arrange images that represent products in this catalog in an online shopping cart in order to construct the representations that appear similar to the a physical collage constructed from a mail-order catalog, other image sources, and real world shopping experiences.